Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

290 MICHAEL PINCHES
offices early in the morning and do not leave until late in the evening. Long nights of
entertaining, eating and drinking are said to have given way to business lunches
and a strictly limited one or two hours of relaxation after work at a fitness club or
celebrity bar. And golf, the increasingly popular sport of the well-to-do, is
commonly described as an occasion for networking and negotiating business
deals, rather than leisurely relaxation. Conversely, just as the cronyist style of
enrichment–characteristic of the Marcos era–is the subject of widespread
derision, so too is the indolence associated with the old elite. Billig (1994:667—8), for
example, reports that several Negros sugar plantation owners ‘have lost the esteem
of their peers because they continue to live the old style life of leisure’, and that
even the children of the Negrense elite were embarrassed by their families.
While much social prestige continues to be attached to an ancestry of landed
wealth, aristocratic breeding and old elite family name, increasing normative
weight is being placed on the ideas of industry, achievement and merit, as more
new rich join the old as the owners of wealth and property. The reconstruction of
the old rich in terms of this ideology centres not only on changed business
practices and the display of a commitment to the work ethic, but also on the idea
of a generational break. In addition to the common references currently made in
Manila business circles to entrepreneurship, or to the money-making prowess of
the Chinese, or the largely untapped positive value reserves of indigenous Malay
Filipinos, there is also much reference in conversation and the mass media to the
coming of a ‘new breed’ of business leaders.
The potency of this construct rests on the ambiguous way in which it represents
change and continuity, embracing, on the one hand, the new rich and the
entrepreneurial meritocratic ethos associated with them, and, on the other, the old
rich, through their younger generation, who are also held to exemplify this ethos.
Thus, the stories one now commonly hears and reads about the younger
generation of executives from old elite families is that they have come to occupy
their present positions having earned high educational credentials in top universities
and, despite their ancestry, that they have had to demonstrate their talent and
industry by working their way up the family corporation. For example, in a special
report which attempts to identify ‘the new breed’, articles dealing with young
executives from three of the country’s oldest and wealthiest elite Spanish-mestizo
families are headed: ‘The job did not come with the silver spoon: The Aboitiz
children relate how they worked their way to the top’; ‘The hardworking Soriano
brothers’; and ‘A former newsboy’s future’ (Business World 1995:5, 83, 100). Most
of the articles dealing with executives or entrepreneurs from families who have
risen to prosperity only over the past forty years have more innocuous headings.
In large part, the idea of a ‘new breed’ represents a push to relegitimise the still
powerful sections of the old elite by appropriating for them the language of
entrepreneurship, and by placing them in the same group as the most successful of
the new rich, above the broader Philippine populace, including the majority of
entrepreneurial capitalists and new middle class. Despite these efforts, the new